Miss Mittens

Well, the cordiality approach with Anna failed miserably. She called me last night and it was a pretty awful conversation involving phrases such as “did you want me to follow you around with a box of tissues?” and “this whole thing is your problem, I don’t know why I should be obliged to put forth any effort.” I tried to be as calm and reconciliatory as possible, but it was clear that before she called she had decided to place 100% of the blame for our current situation on me, articulate that she didn’t like me (in any sense), and clarify that she didn’t want to be friends with me. She said that she would say “hi” in the department and it was up to me if I wanted to say “hi” back or not. There were a lot of other things said that I don’t recall at the moment (and don’t particularly want to), but it was very aggressive and ruthless in tone.

The conversation cemented that there is nothing more to be done, and that we are incapable of understanding each others’ position (that would be the nice way of phrasing it). I went to bed confused and a little affronted about the conversation that had just occurred, but after an evening of nightmares, I woke up feeling really hurt. While I agree with many of her conclusions (that friendship would be difficult and unlikely), a lot of the things she said and the way she said them were just plain mean. Beyond failing to understand how having BPD makes the situation more difficult for me, I’m not sure she understands feelings or the concept of emotional altruism in general. Not that I deserved any such consideration, but I’m not sure I deserved the aggressive and demeaning tone I experienced.

Everyone tells me to move on, and I have in a dating sense (I quit pining for her a while ago, and I took steps to actively try to meet people recently). However, today I can’t help but feel hurt. I know I shouldn’t let one person’s interpretation of events or opinion of me get to me so much, but it’s difficult. And now, rather than feeling sad or awkward when I see her in the department and we don’t talk (the two previous stages), now I just feel like I’ve run into a bully.

I’ll do my best to forget about this, just like I have each time before, but this really has made the last several months occasionally miserable for me, and except for the email conversation where I lost my cool and said a few mean things myself, I’m not sure what I’ve done to deserve it. I don’t feel like I’m that hard to get along with, and while exes are a special case, I’ve really tried in this instance, and I don’t know why it’s failed so miserably.

I’m very tired today in ever sense of the word. I’m tired because I started taking the Lexapro at full strength again (I caved — I was having dramatic mood swings without it), and I forgot that it makes you really sleepy when you’re getting used to it. I’m also tired of being on all these medications that are supposed to help (and clearly do to some extent), but still feeling very far from stable or happy.

I’m still getting the Lexapro back in my system (I think it was a big mistake to go off of it), but today I felt really suicidal. And as usual when I’m feeling suicidal, I think about how much of my life has been spent struggling with this disorder, and how unappealing the future looks if it’s going to be more of the same indefinitely. In an attempt to be positive, I’ve been reading my Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder that the last therapist I saw recommended. I can’t say Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy approach is flawed–statistically it seems to help more than half of people suffering with BPD–but it is very tiring.

I’ve spent the bulk of this evening feeling surges of suicidal ideation or the impulse to put my hand through the wall and then I have to go through the workbook and use this stupid checklist to analyze every micro-thought that contributed to the aforementioned emotional responses. And now I’m doing my “Interpersonal Effectiveness” homework sheet, and it all seems very demeaning. The whole fucking sheet of questions is almost as self-evident as 2 + 2 = ___. And I get frustrated because I have to repeat or generate the most mundane thoughts to myself to keep from going to pieces emotionally. To be so intelligent and yet have such difficulty with emotional regulation is really abhorrent.

If it were possible to exorcise all emotions in order to get rid of the awful ones that I have trouble regulating, I think I might do it. Then again another thing I know is that people with BPD have great difficulty experiencing or imagining feeling any other way than they do at the present moment, so I’m not sure any emotional proclamation about the future means much at all coming from me.

Oh dear, this last week has been a challenge. My emotional disposition is non-linear, and this week has been a particularly pronounced valley. The panic attack on Tuesday and mini-breakdown of Wednesday can be attributed to three factors: (a) running into Anna several times in the department, (b) withdrawling from Lexapro (which I’m realizing manifests much more emotionally than physically), (c) the sheer volume of work I have saddled upon myself with the dissertation proposal and all of the extra things I’m involved in.

(a) On Anna — I emailed her and we are going to have an in-person conversation soon to try to make for a more positive working environment. I’m ambivalent about this meeting, but I think it needs to happen because the situation between us is becoming increasingly charged for me. I don’t want to think ahead about what I’m going to say too much, and just see how it goes. I’m finding that having really low expectations is probably the safest route (though assuming the worst/minimum of Anna is what has made our (non)interactions in the department so troubling for me). I was content to not see her at all after our electronic fight when she pushed my buttons and I become livid, but as my anger faded, I came to feel the unpleasantness of the status quo more profoundly. Although the performance of our indifference to the other is in theory reciprocal, I tend to experience each instance of it as a mini-rejection; a rejection that becomes all the more pronounced because of its quotidian nature. I tend to care too much about what people think of me in general, but the more intimate I have been with a particular person at any point in time, the more sensitive I am to future interactions with them (this mainly applies to people I have dated, but also to some close friends). More than a distinct individual, for me, Anna has come to personify and mirror all of the things about myself that I dislike or assume would make a person not want to be in my life or care about me. And the indifference is much worse than anger — when someone looks at you, registers that it’s you, and then looks away without so much as a nod, it feels like a negation of humanity.

Clearly the way I have come to internalize and experience our (non)interactions is incredibly destructive and needs to change. I hope that a conversation can do that, even if just a little bit. I’ll do my best to not open up very much to her, because I tend to be oversensitive to what I perceive as condescension or indifference in direct proportion to the vulnerability I feel (which is a function of how much I share with the person).

I’m also going to look through my borderline workbooks a little before we meet. This week the symptoms have become manifest quite strongly (epitomized in the masochistic and unfair transference of my issues with Anna onto Lexi on Tuesday and my Ambien/Ativan/Klonopin overdose with a bottle of wine last night that probably nearly put me into a coma). When I woke up at three in the morning I was having trouble breathing (a consequence of mixing so many CNS depressants that are not supposed to be mixed). At 3:00 a.m., I moved from the couch to my bed, and then switched from sleeping at the head of my bed to the foot of my bed and opened the window to get some cold, fresh air. Lazarus cuddled up with me, which was a rare alignment of his sleepiness with my desire for him to be docile. But it was still an unpleasant moment of acute awareness of how much I had ingested mixed with panic and delirium (if I fall back asleep, will I wake up?)

(b) On lexapro — As I previously mentioned, I am transitioning off of all of my medications in favor of exercise and healthy living (diet and semi-teetotaling). I am down to 1mg of benzodiazepines/day, from a few months of 3mg. I went from 10 mg of lexapro down to 2.5 mg. And while I’ve been very slow with that transition, I was on lexapro for a year and a half, so my body was pretty saturated. I didn’t even think I was feeling withdrawal symptoms until I had a slight headache and dizziness a few days ago that didn’t go away with coffee or ibuprofen. Then on Tuesday I started to feel a surge of adrenaline and an impulse to put my fist through a wall for no reason. Then I freaked out about Anna, sent an email to Lexi and started to have a bad panic attack (one of the ones where I feel impulsively suicidal). So I took a double-dose of Ambien and fell asleep crying at 7:00 p.m. The next day I noticed I was incredibly irritable and full of non-targeted anger. After I finished my work for Bonnie for the day, I made myself my overdose cocktail and watched a movie before I passed out on the couch. Prior to passing out, I sent several emails that I deleted (I always delete emails right away when I think they might upset me or embarrass me later), and I’m not sure what they said because Ambien disrupts the formation of memories (the main reason you are only supposed to take it and then go to bed). A few strange replies I received today gave some clues, but I’m pretty sure they were just the ramblings of an overdosed wreck.

(c) On the number of things I’m involved in. Working for Bonnie is taking over my life, and (a) and (b) have made it difficult for me to focus on the other things I am accountable for this week, so I have been getting stressed out about the responsibilities that I feel I have fucked up. I was going to go off lexapro all together in a few days, but I think I’ll transition for a while longer. If things with Anna improve, and I feel more stable, I’ll be able to work more efficiently and then feel less stressed and worthless as a grad student.

I decided to dramatically change the structure of my dissertation proposal and focus on the application of a theoretical argument in different ways rather than look at multiple cases in the Middle East. In other words, I only want one chapter to be about the Middle East. The general argument applies critiques of enlightenment reason in democratic theory and certain strands of continental philosophy to various phenomena within IR that aren’t typically discussed within a “traditional” IR framework. More specifically, I want to try to integrate political theory’s displacement of the rational sovereign subject into the IR realm and look at the human/nature divide, mental illness in an international human rights context, and several other “cases” beyond religion/secularism/Political Islam in the ME. My main concern is that the way I’ve started to formulate each chapter feels like a dissertation unto itself.

The whole architecture is really rough at the moment (and it’s going to take several months to refine a lot of it), but I like the idea of having the focus be “what can democratic theory teach IR?” rather than religion and secularism in the ME. And I like the style of having each chapter (after the intro and genealogical/theoretical chapters) be more like a story, with varying theorists and empirical topics being covered, but linking up to a general critique of the state of American IR because of the outdatedness of particular categories indebted to the enlightenment and “liberal modernity.”

Today I will be productive. Today I will be productive. Today I will be productive.

Well, after a short exchange it’s very obvious that Anna and I are not going to be friends. I think this is definitely for the best after an unpleasant email exchange in which I eventually got furious at her tactlessness, condescension, and inability to understand what I thought I was clearly and even-handedly communicating. In my last email I inserted several expletives and referred to her as “hopelessly egocentric” and “emotionally retarded.” And as harsh as those statements might sound, I firmly believe them.

The bright side of the exchange was that I realized I wasn’t in love with her (and had obviously created a fictitious image of her in my head that I was idealizing). After a few emails I wanted to reach through the computer and strangle her. I also realized how many things I didn’t like about her that I was ignoring or putting up with while we were dating. If we had actually dated longer I shudder to imagine what an actual fight would have been like when I quit indulging her and eventually snapped (like I did today). She’s the sort of person that can’t see fault with themselves — she thought my avoidance of her post-breakup was an “insult.” In the last email I wrote to her today I included a p.s. in which I said, “and for clarification (since you seem to need so much of that), this is a fucking insult.”

I can admit fault. I am aware of many things I do in relationships that I need to work on, and I know that the things I said today weren’t mature or diplomatic (though I did avoid saying “hate” or using the “c” word). I admit to being stubborn, and recognize that when someone pushes me over the edge, I do have an angry streak. I recognize that the reason I’m not friends with most of my exes is the result of my Italian temper and my inability to be the bigger person when I sense condescension in the after-breakup talks. And the list goes on, but at least I acknowledge it.

With Anna, my main regret is that we ever started hanging out, since now I have an incredibly negative opinion of her. I don’t think I could be in the same room with her because the condescending (and unnecessary) reference in her last email about breaking up with me because she didn’t like me and that she still doesn’t like me made me livid (what about my effort to reach out to her as a friend made that necessary to reiterate?!). My second regret is that we waited so long to have this conversation since I can’t believe I spent any time being sad that our relationship ended. I can’t believe I wasted two months struggling with depression and low self-esteem over her. My third regret is that she thinks I was/am still in love with her, when actually having this email exchange was so infuriating that I don’t think I ever really could have been.

Ok, I’m done with my tirade. This is the end of the energy I’m going to expend on her. I can’t promise to be polite if I see her, but I will do my best to hold my tongue. I’m going to channel my daruma and move on from this as positively as I can.

Lessons learned: (1) Pay more attention to red flags when I start to see someone, (2) Make more of an effort to not let the actions of others affect me so much, because in most cases they are not worth it, (3) Don’t put up with as much as I do when I start dating someone because it will only lead to increased anger and resentment if/when things go south, (4) Be really honest with myself about what I want/need in a relationship and who I am apart from the relationship, (5) Do not focus on the positive qualities of partners to the extent that I am willfully naive to the negative ones, and (6) Don’t extend the olive branch of friendship afterward until I’m sure I really want to be friends and I’m confident we could have non-dramatic interactions (which means realistically evaluating myself and the other person).

Some of these lessons I should have learned a long time ago, but even Lazarus needs three sprays with the water bottle to get off the stereo. For me, 2010 starts today (and I’d like to forget the anemia symptoms, depression, and drama of the first actual week).

Why did I send an email explaining all the reasons why I had been avoiding her? Probably because she obviously didn’t understand and was taking it as insult. So I sent an email that was very non-aggressive or bitter, but I poured my heart out in it explaining things from my perspective. Now I feel like I’m waiting to be dumped again by whatever the response is, though I’m trying to tell myself that it shouldn’t matter if she cares, or understands, or thinks I’m pathetic or any other possible response.

At least I found out why I’ve been so run-down post-H1N1 (Anemia). I’m taking iron supplements and am slowly starting to get a little more energy and concentration back. Fuck, I know I’m in a bad mood if the consolation for the day is “at least I found out I have Anemia.”

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Most of my flu/cough/etc symptoms are gone, but I still feel really run down (and have been sleeping 14 hrs a day). I’ve lost more weight, which puts me within two lbs. of my target weight of 125 lbs., but the fact that I’ve lost 10 lbs. in three weeks from being sick isn’t healthy. And today in the shower I noticed lymph nodes swollen all over my body in places I’ve never had swollen lymph nodes before. At first I thought I had tumors all over and freaked out, but then I realized all the bumps were in places that lymph nodes exist. So I’m going back to the doctor tomorrow…

Some exciting things have happened in the last week. First and foremost, I decided to lease a 2010 Jetta, thus fulfilling my lifelong dream of Jetta ownership. There are a variety of reasons I opted for the lease instead of buying an older car on installment, but I think the biggest is that I can just turn it in about the time I’m done at Northwestern, and all the maintenance/parts/car washes/oil changes/tabs/etc are covered in the meantime. I may decide to keep it and finish paying it off at the end of the three years, but who knows where I might be and if I would need to get rid of the car at that time without having to sell it.

Actually, I guess that’s the only exciting thing. I’ve continued to be sick most of the time, preventing me from being very productive (read: productive at all). I’ve been really weak, sleeping a lot, and getting exhausted doing the most basic things around the house. I’ll give it a few more days before I go back to the doctor.

I have a sneaking suspicion that it could be liver damage again from the medications I’m taking. When I was 15, I tried to kill myself by taking an entire large bottle of aspirin, and I came really close to dying (I could feel the life drain out of me and something like my life flashing before my eyes as I passed out). I woke up in the hospital and lied about how many I had taken so I didn’t have to get my stomach pumped or drink charcoal (in hindsight, not the best decision). Since then, I have never taken aspirin because the thought of it brings back memories of how sick I felt in the aftermath of that, but now it occurs to me that since aspirin is metabolized by the liver, that incident is probably the reason that I’ve had liver issues on and off the past few years.

I got so sick from Zoloft (liver metabolized) during my second year when stress was also a factor that was lowering my immune system. Now,  I’ve been sickly this whole break after H1N1 lowered my immune system dramatically. I’m taking three medications that are metabolized through the liver now and I’m in the process of phasing off of them all, but based on how sick one drink made me on NYE, I think my liver is acting up again, and I think it probably has to do with difficulties metabolizing pharmaceuticals for extended periods of time, especially when I am under physical or psychological stress. I’ve been staying away from alcohol for the most part over break, and I plan to do so until I start feeling a lot better. But when my liver isn’t happy, my body seems to have trouble metabolizing everything except water. And I’ve definitely had trouble processing any kind of food or drink the past few days.

I’ll see what the doctor has to say if I don’t feel better soon, but I feel really similarly to how I did during my second year, so I have a sneaking suspicion this might be the issue (and that H1N1 was a catalyst). Also, since I’m not supposed to drink on any of my medications, there could be a cumulative effect of the toll of the medications over time exacerbated by alcohol consumption. I never mentioned the aspirin-overdose thing to doctors during my second year because I think I was trying to block it out, but now I think it might be pertinent information to share.

While I’m less anxious or depressed (and certainly better than I was in November and December), I’m still struggling emotionally somewhat. As much as I hate to admit it, I’m still hung up on Anna. We dated a short period, and I can recognize ways in which we were incompatible (interest and personality-wise), but I was starting to fall in love with her, and I am having trouble shaking it. It seems like the fact that we haven’t spoken in almost two months is making it worse, not better. I’m just trying to focus on work, friends, new car, etc., but it’s eating away at me. In that way where I’ve started to forget the anger and disappointment I felt at the way she flaked out, and instead I just miss her. I try to focus on the negative aspects, but that doesn’t help much either. I don’t know why it should be this unnerving since we only hung out together for a little over two months, but I opened up a lot to her, and I had a lot of fun until the very end. Then I question whether I miss her or this idealized version of her that I had in my mind until she broke my heart (do we ever really know a person beyond our idea of who they are?).

At any rate, I left her a Christmas present in her mailbox. A bottle of the perfume she wears (which I had and decided I couldn’t wear again–scents are too tied to memory and emotion). The bottle was almost full, and it’s an expensive perfume so it wasn’t like dumping off second-hand goods. I also left an Itunes gift card taped to it since she has that ipod I gave her. I don’t expect to hear anything from her (I left no note or anything), and I don’t expect to ever be close again, much less date in the future, but something in me wanted to leave that because I thought she might like those items. If I had to pinpoint the emotional rationale, the most honest answer I could give would be sadness or grief.

I feel like I’m putting together a puzzle again. A puzzle I’ve tried to put together most of my adult life (but without the box for help). Sometimes I feel like a lot of the pieces are falling into place (though in hindsight I have to admit it’s because I’ve been forcing some of then together). Periodically the table gets turned over, all the pieces fall to the ground and I have to start again. Experience helps me put the border together more quickly, but each time I approach the middle section, I wonder anew which pieces go where. What I thought was the sky now seems more like the ocean. It takes time and effort to make progress (and care not to force any of the pieces). But the most frustrating thing is that I know some of the pieces are missing, and I don’t quite know where I should be looking for them.